Slant Magazine: "Best Albums of the '90s"

BY SLANT STAFF ON FEBRUARY 14, 2011

72. Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes. Blurring the line between artist and cult leader, Tori Amos's epistles are intimate and seductive, allowing anyone who has ever been a victim or who has ever struggled to find his or her own voice to derive deeply personal meanings from her mishmash of religious iconography, pop culture non sequiturs, and harrowing first-person details. Her mythology has become more convoluted and frankly insufferable over the years, but Amos's Little Earthquakes still plays like a revelation, with its cutting turns of phrase ("Boy, you'd best pray that I bleed real soon" remains perhaps the most loaded line in her catalogue) and simply masterful piano work causing seismic upheavals that are anything but little. JK

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83. Tori Amos, From the Choirgirl Hotel. Any of Tori Amos's three follow-ups to her breakthrough Little Earthquakes could have made this list: her exquisite "piano" album, Under the Pink; her eccentric "harpsichord" album, Boys for Pele; or her impeccably produced (courtesy of Amos herself) "electronic" album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. Sure, electronica was all the rage in the late '90s, but it was Amos's willingness to push herself crimson-haired headfirst into the genre that gives From the Choirgirl Hotel the edge. The album's textures and industrial-rock beats are married perfectly to Amos's tortured, self-lacerating lyrics, which, reflecting on her anguish over a recent miscarriage, are explempary of the singer-songwriter's expertise in turning personal tragedy into catharsis for both performer and listener alike. SC

via Slant Magazine (1-2)